I Survived MegaCon 2016: It Felt Like I Walked For Two Days

Oh, wait. I DID.

(Hold on, quick update here as of 5/29/2018: Whoa, getting a ton of traffic here but I think it's people looking for the 2018 MegaCon, which I did attend but I don't have those photos or videos uploaded yet. OKAY now I have it up. GO HERE FOR 2018 PICS and VIDS. Danke)

Previous MegaCon trips had been one-day affairs: drive in, walk about, sometimes in cosplay, other times shopping for fan art, then drive back home in bad traffic.

This time, with MegaCon falling on a long Memorial Day weekend - and having vacation time to use up at work - I took both Friday and Saturday to attend the comic-book scifi-fantasy gaming fanfic fanfilm extravaganza.

Still bad traffic both times though. Dear State of Florida: we could have had alternate rail transit DECADES ago and yet we're still dealing with congestion up the damn wazoo. I'd be calling I-4 between 8 am to 8 pm the world's worst parking lot, except I've been to Washington DC's beltway and have endured just as bad. At least DC has a Metro system to provide alternative means to... (Metro line catches fire for the ninth straight day) DAMMIT.

Anyway, documentation of the convention! As threatened, I documented the atrocities:

FREYA'S DAY

In order to get to the Convention center early enough to avoid the parking lot nightmare - not enough entry points, too many attendees - I have to leave before the break of dawn. The good thing is I get to watch the balloons lifting off in the mornings with the sun rising to greet the day... (you gotta zoom in to see: you're not supposed to snapshot and drive...)

VILLAIN-CON! The hotel where the Libertarian National Convention was convening this same weekend. I earlier fretted that we'd get bigger traffic jams and security issues and media attention because of it... but no, nada. Did any Libertarians actually show up? Because neither did the media crews...

Holy sh-t, people! It's Nat!

Back in the early 1990s some communities started up free Internet portal services called FreeNets. South Florida libraries started one called SEFLIN, and they created a local chat group called the SEFLIN Cafe that got quickly taken over by crazies sane rational and well-composed individuals of wisdom and sagacity. For some reason, I was a member. Nat was in the group as well. The FreeNet itself is long dead - it was text-only in a time of Internet Browsers, when graphics and video play dominated the 'Net there was no place for it - and the SEFLIN Cafe krewe scattered to the four corners of the world, but we've kept in touch...

Nat does the smart thing: he came with the missus and friends.

This is us goofing off as I get the Wristband of Power to grant me access to most convention places. He got Premium, which upgraded to Nametag status and better access.

One of the disadvantages of getting to the 'Con early is that you get there and then stand around in lines waiting for the official opening. Seriously, MegaCon people, you should be able to set up a waiting area with some activity to keep people occupied as you set up for the day. Like, maybe, a large monitor playing movie previews or a movie short or three that would thrill the crowd.

Cosplay! Ruby Rose!

"I say, old chap, any Death Star battle plans I might be able to smuggle for you this day?"

There is seriously a huge Steampunk fan base in the Orlando area, so I'm not too surprised the R2-D2 building community created a Victorian-esque droid.

Autograph lines.

From my experience with the Tampa Bay Comic Con, I know that every Con will have a plethora of Deadpools. It's one of the easier costumes to buy and then customize, because Deadpool is a character that can't be taken seriously and so... uh... you can make Deadpool into a housewife or a Steampunk or... uh...

You can make him into Donald Trump.

Oh no. GOD NO. Not Trump. #NEVERTRUMP

 Artists Alley!

Look kids! Gail Simone! (applause)

Female Kylo Ren (yes, gender flips are allowed in Cosplay)! Okay, now can we get a smile out of you, Ren? Ren...?

Whoa. 3D printing is a thing now, and they can set up a camera system to scan human bodies to make your own figurine! It's costly though - out of the budget scale of this poor librarian - but if you want to, this company is Zero Point 3D and they got a Facebook page and email and you can find out which conventions they'll be at next.

There is a Vaunt 3D company providing a similar service.

This is how packed it got on Friday. Saturday is the busier day...

The NaNoWriMo discussion panel! That's Bill Hatfield in the middle, NaNo organizers Berti Walker and Elyse Reyes to the left... and the guys on the right I didn't get business cards from, okay so someone's gotta tell me their names.

They set up the discussion in a classroom setup this time, nice.

First rule of NaNo Club: YOU WRITE 50,000 Words! Second rule: No Fight Club jokes...!

Rey Cosplay! I will only take pictures of the ones who fulfill their destiny and take the lightsaber that calls to them...

Speaking of which, Ultra Sabers set up shop this year selling a whole bunch of the glowy ones! Very pricey, but they have customized handles! (I was told there was a second vendor over in the Anime area, but I couldn't find them)

Selfie as I wait in line for the Kevin Conroy Q&A (One clue on my shirt explaining who HE is)

"I... AM... BATMAN!" Kevin Conroy just will not sit down for a Q&A. He bounces around the stage...

Friday ended for me around 5 PM, I went to a Don Pablo's restaurant for dinner and then got stuck in I-4 Traffic hell to where I didn't get back home until 9 PM. /headdesk

SATURN'S DAY

I know this day is busier, and so I headed out super-early for this one as well. Still get there too early and I get stuck waiting in lines again, but at least this time I look geeky doing it...

 As noted, Saturday gets to be a bigger Cosplay day.

Daft Punk! I know that's more music genre, but they are major figures in the anime and scifi communities so they are allowed!

I'm not the only Jedi who prefers BLUE as a robe color. All those other Jedi get so DRAB in browns and grays...

Watch out, lady! That's a Blogon!

Look, kids! It's a Mickey Mouse Sorcerer's Apprentice Deadpool! He'll stop the Dalek!

Unfortunately, the Mickey Mouse Sorcerer's Apprentice Deadpool got distracted by Francis, so he left the job to me...

From here, I went to the OTHER END of the convention hall (West concourse is a very long place) to wait for the Hayley Atwell Q&A.

While waiting in line, as noted, you get bored, and the occasional saber fight will break out...

Watch out kid, you'll poke somebody's eye out with that thing...

Hayley Atwell - Agent Carter, AKA the Next Doctor Who if the producers had any inkling how the fan base would thrill to it - is an absolute delight to listen to as she raps about her work.

Oh, right, the Jedi robe has a hoodie to it...

COSPLAY!

COSPLAY! With Deadpool photobomb! Damn you, my old nemesis...!

More R2 fun! This one is a Boba Fett inspired droid!

MORE COSPLAY!

MORE GLOWY LIGHTSABERS! We have the technology now...

MORE BOUNTY HUNTERS! I mean Cosplay!

MORE GAMERS! So this is where half the conventioneers go while everyone else walks and walks and walks some more... Oh, my feets...

I gots video clips as well, which I will upload in due time for sharing.

MegaCon is going on until Monday, I believe. But I'm done. Two days of intense walking is good enough for me... ow ow ow ow ow...

By the way, anyone hear who won the Libertarian convention...?

Welcome to Blog Post 1000. Gosh, What a Lovely Post.

Having reached blog post No. 1000 tonight, and with that...

...I got nothing.

Well, not entirely true. I have MegaCon to report on, and there's the ongoing train wreck that is the 2016 Election cycle, and there's the distinct possibility I'm getting a book published with some of my more intense blog articles I've written here.

But I don't exactly have anything profound to write here, not for a key milestone like 1000.

I could rant some more about the dangers of Donald Trump, the hassles of Bernie Sanders' delusions of pushing for a Democratic breakup and revolution within the ranks, or whether or not Lucky Charms should stay a breakfast cereal or a full-time snack.

The truth is, I'm having a busy weekend, I'm tired, and despite the milestone I'd rather not overthink this.

I'll just add a YouTube video and go to bed.

Coming up close\
Everything sounds like\
Welcome home\
Come home and\
Oh, by the way
Don't you know that I could make\
A dream that's barely half-awake\
Come true\
I wanted to say\
But anything I could have said\
I felt somehow
That you already knew... Aimee Mann and Til Tuesday

An incredibly beautiful song. It horrifies me that this song never broke the Top 40 in the U.S. back in 1987.

Volunteers For the Republican (Expletive) Patrol

So this crossed my screen as I read Balloon Juice today, that Newt Gingrich - ex-Speaker of the House, Hypocrite Supreme, and Fifth-Worst Person to Ever Come Out of Georgia - is actively campaigning to be Trump's Vice Presidential tag-team partner:

The Newt’s thin skin and enormous ego are indeed very reminiscent of a certain short-fingered vulgarian, and Gingrich’s inability to keep his eye on the prize (or his pecker in his pants) were largely responsible for the implosion of the GOP’s ‘new permanent majority’ twenty years ago. Putting him under the lights with Deadbeat Donald over the next five months would mean taking bets on which of the two would throw a total pants-soiling hissy-fit first… and whether it would be directed at the other half of the ticket.

While Anne Laurie is treating this as good news - because Newt's not all that popular even among fellow Republicans - I'm still wary of the entire situation. Partly because Trump's polling numbers are NOT going down as I would want, and I'd much prefer Trump going with a greater brain-fart candidate that would truly alienate everyone from here to "iHeart" Pluto.

Another part of it is that while Gingrich's "permanent majority" fell out of power by 2006, by 2010 an even worse version of the Republican Congress rose from those ashes. So nothing can be taken for granted here.

And the thing is, Newt's not the only one. Ex-Governor Rick Perry has been actively petitioning, among several other celebrity wannabes and hangers-on. The supposed split among the Republican ranks hasn't really happened as hoped for, because the overriding tribal affiliation to the Party has resumed control of every Far Right wingnut's mind.

They may not WANT Trump in their deepest part of their collective soul, but they will support him because they have to, even if it means twisting their bent logic - "Oh, he's not REALLY that racist or sexist or ignorant of facts" - into tighter knots than ever before.

And so, there are volunteers for the Shit Detail that is the Number Two Guy on the Trump ticket.

I've pondered before why anyone would take the Vice Presidency - historically speaking, it's an office that had been alienated by nearly every President who preferred their own counsel and Cabinet - outside of party loyalty. It's been a place where political careers go to die (literally in some cases: there are as many dead Veeps as there have been dead Presidents). Granted, ever since the Cold War and the need for proper succession made the Veep job more vital, it's still mostly a hanger-on job: very few modern Vice Presidents successfully become Presidents on their own terms (sorry, Al) and even then never with two full terms (sorry, Bush the Elder and Van Buren).

A lot of it had to do with the office being used to "balance" the party ticket: to placate the faction that lost the Presidency race. Because of that, the Vice President was someone philosophically opposed - sometimes personally opposed - to the Boss, who knew it and would never build a rapport.

Nowadays, the Vice Presidency job has a relatively high profile - due to 25th Amendment considerations, Veeps have to be in the loop more often and their counsel more valued. In the proper environment, a popular Vice President could move post-office into a party role as mentor, with a lot of perks and fewer headaches. So there is some value to being a Veep now.

For Newt - someone who's been driven from high office and looking for some kind of comeback (I'm surprised he never tried for the governor's seat, like most exiles from DC tend to aim for) - even being a Vice President nominee could bring him back into a major intra-party role. That could explain part of his interest.

There's another possibility: getting into the Oval Office with Trump getting kicked out of it...

The Republican Party leadership - plus a lot of outside observers, myself included - still have the nagging feeling that Trump really isn't interested or motivated to really be President. That is, he's running because he started it and can't back out as he needs to satisfy that bloated narcissistic Id of his. This is a guy who likes things handed to him on a gold platter and for things to be easy: whenever anything in his business or personal life gets too hard to cope with, he's shown the habit of dropping that problem like a hot potato and running away.

His World-view and Character is of someone who avoids the major conflict even as he drives towards it, diverts the matter into bankruptcy or divorce court, and moves on to another "easy money" project without a care. For all his tough talk and bluster, he doesn't stick to anything of lasting import or value.

As Trump gets closer to the possibility of winning the whole campaign, more observers are noting how implausible - if not impossible - many of Trump's political promises can even see the light of day. Not so much his offer of a massive tax-cut plan - a Republican Congress will eagerly pass it or something similarly bad - but the promises of mass deportation of illegals, the massive border wall with Mexico, and a trade war with China.

Trump can't change or avoid those promises - although he'd have to if he "pivots" to a moderate stance that abhors such frivolity and race hatred - so he'll likely have to offer something fulfilling those plans if he's President by January 2017. And then he - and the Republican Congress - are going to slam into some serious Brick Walls of Reality:

• The costs of a massive wall with Mexico would range from $1.6 billion and up: and despite Trump's argument he can make Mexico pay for it, the money's likely going to have to come from American taxpayers.
• The costs and manpower of a mass deportation program would range in the hundreds of billions: again, taxpayers are going to have to pay for it and have to deal with the growth of yet another government bureaucracy (something Republicans are supposed to loathe). And that would be nothing compared to the human cost of wrongful arrests of legal citizens, broken families, and civil rights violations. Not to mention the negative impact this would have on our economy: for all the ranting against illegal immigrants, if we actually do what Trump wants it would cut 2 percent off of GDP and cost us around 600 BILLION in lost revenues.
• The costs of a trade war with China - or any other nation - would hurt the U.S. economy, and trigger economic chaos across most of the globe. Trump claims he can bring the other nations to heel by imposing our will on them, but that comes across as extortion, and not a lot of countries like to play that game.

Those examples prove why - in the Real World as a lot of President-Elects find out real fucking fast - the President of the United States is a lot less powerful than the job title (LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD) makes it seem. You can talk and promise all you want, but once you sit in that chair you're going to find that throne room becomes a prison awful quick...

Ergo: if Trump gets into the Oval Office, he's going to get frustrated with the limits of power he's going to run into. He's going to slam hard not only into the political realities of foreign policy and military interventionism, but he's also going to run against the separation of powers between his office and Capitol Hill.

While it's likely Trump will inherit a Republican-controlled Congress if he wins, it's also likely he's going to inherit a Congress that's out-of-control with the backbencher Tea Party factions making the Speaker and Senate Majority Leader's lives a living hell. Getting any bills through Congress can become a conflict, and Trump's managerial style of bullying and taking what he wants is going to rub a lot of political egos - you never deal with One Congress, you're dealing with 535 Maniacs - the wrong way.

I have marked Trump as a severe Active-Negative character, and historical trends with A-N types - Adams, Buchanan, Wilson, Hoover, LBJ, Nixon, Carter - even with a favorable Congress had a lot of bad blood spilled. Trump could well cause a Constitutional crisis with Congress without even planning to, and given his nature of "bluff first, quit later" it can play out one of two ways.

Trump could quit when the going gets tough, or Trump could get seriously impeached - by his fellow Republicans, whose leadership you'll recall are NOT really fans of his - because he'll cross a line that should never be crossed. And we're talking about Trump whose long list of failures and con jobs point to a man who never paid a price for crossing any lines, and will likely commit a mortal sin before his first week in office is over.

If we're playing out this game, both possibilities equal one result: the Vice President when Trump leaves becomes President.

Now all of a sudden, being Veep is a more appealing position. Despite the likelihood of public humiliation of being Trump's Bell-Boy carrying his luggage - hi, Chris Christie! - the high odds of Trump quitting or getting "fired" for his inevitable transgressions would make it all worth one's while.

It'd be an easy way to sneak into an office that Newt - or Perry, or Palin, or any of the other volunteers - was never able to win on his/her own. If they play it right they could present themselves as "savior" to their party (and the nation) and make a run in 2020 as the incumbent. As long as Trump's disastrous yet short reign didn't cause a massive calamity like a global depression or yet another ground war of doom, they would get good odds to win...

So I'm not surprised by the number of eager cadets lining up for the demeaning job of Trump's Sidekick.

I'm actually a little horrified, because there's enough of these Republicans in party leadership positions genuinely believing they got a shot to win. They can't be that deluded, can they...?

Oh, and ego alert here: I was off by one blog count, so this is actually my 999th blog article. THE NEXT ONE is 1000. I gotta make it count...

This Is What the Constant BernieBro Backlash Has Brought Me To

(Update: Big hello again to the Crooks & Liars audience visiting via the Mike's Blog Round-Up link! Thank you again, Infidel753 for the promotion!)

What I'm seeing in the Twitter feeds and on Salon.com - that site has gone so far in for Bernie and so against Hillary that when Hillary wins I'm afeared they'll go full Trump on us - that "we" need to blow up the Democratic Party to save it has driven me to break out the trout and perform the most epic of put-downs:

Breaking out poorly edited Monty Python snark.

Overheard at a Bernie Sanders Support Meeting

Bernie: All right, Shaun King. Don't labor the point. And what have the Democratic Party ever given us in return?

X-Man fan: Civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Bernie: Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.

Guy Fawkes Mask Guy: And the unionized sanitation workers!

Shaun: Oh yes... sanitation unions, Bernie, you remember what the city used to be like whenever they'd go on strike.

Bernie: All right, I'll grant you that the civil rights and the sanitation unions are two things that the Democrats have done...

Jeff: And the roads bills they keep pushing so we can fix our aging highways and bridges...

Bernie: (angry) Well yes obviously the roads and bridges... the roads and bridges go without saying. But apart from the civil rights, the sanitation unions, and the roads...

Another Activist dressed like a Ghostbuster: Climate change activism...

Other Cosplay Voices: Cheaper Medicine... Public Education... Frank-Dodd regulations... Obamacare getting 90 percent of the population covered...

Bernie: Yes... all right, fair enough...

Anime Fan near the front: And Obama does his own crafted brewing! I've shared some recipes with him!

All of the Mob: Oh yes! True!

Pope Francis: Yeah. That's something we'd really miss if the Democrats broke up, Bernie.

Stan Lee (cameo): And the crime rate's dropped during the last eight years.

Pope Francis: Yes, they certainly know how to keep order... (The crowd nods)... let's face it, they're the only ones who could in a nation like this.

Bernie (frustrated): All right... all right... but apart from the civil rights and the sanitation unions and Obamacare and education and climate change issues and microbreweries and roads and a regulated financial system and public order... what have the Democratic Party done for us?

Jeff: Nobel peace prizes?

Bernie: (angry) What!? (scornfully) Peace... shut it!

(The previous has been ripped shamelessly from Life of Brian)

I have a little too much MegaCon conventioning on my mind right now. Apologies for that.

Just to note, this is post No.999 on this blog. So the next one I do has got to be a biggie. Keep alert.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? May 2016 Convention Edition (w/ Update)

So here I am in Central Florida, it's that time of year for me to indulge in my cosplay geekery by heading out to the Orlando MegaCon as I threaten to do over and over. This year it fell on Memorial Day weekend, which gave the organizers the excuse to extend the craziness out for FOUR full days of sci-fi fantasy horror anime comic book gaming hilarity.

And here I am also keeping up with the current political Hurricane Of Doom, with Category 5 Trump heading for the coastline and Tropical Storm Bernie threatening to upgrade and blow down the Democratic infrastructure...

To where I'm seeing more and more news about Gary Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico and Favorite Son of the Libertarian Party, making arrangements to secure that party's nomination alongside a fellow ex-Republican governor to convert the Libertarians into the "Savior alternative" to Trump that the Far Right media pundits are craving to follow.

The big event is scheduled for the upcoming Libertarian National Convention where the nominee process will get confirmed. And it's scheduled for Memorial Day Weekend.

In Orlando FL.

Oh No. OH NO.

I went and checked the maps. The Libertarian convention is being held in a hotel... just across the street from the main (West) concourse of the Orange County (Orlando) Convention Center where MegaCon is going to be.

Never mind the horrors this is going to create for traffic. If you recall, my previous diaries of attending MegaCons all start off with the nightmarish traffic jams getting into the damn parking lots at the Convention Center. With a political convention being held in that area, there's going to be roadblocks, diverted lanes, even security checkpoints that can screw up everything just getting there. To hell with getting there super-early on a Saturday morning, I'm going to have to go in Friday with camping gear and stay the night to make sure.

I'm worried we're going to get some trouble of the "differing philosophies" kind. Granted, there's already a large contingent of Heinlein/Rand Libertarian fans among the sci-fi community that can show up at these cons, but I am afeared they're going to get a little riled up with a nearby nominating party that will get them drunk on imported Colorado medicinal herbs and small government rhetoric.

All it's gonna take is one Atlas Shrugged cosplayer getting into a shouting match with a Trekkie over "The Needs of the Many" and it'll be the Pumpkin Spice Wars all over again.

Madness. Utter madness ahead.

And I cannot avoid it. I've got an obligation to show. There's a panel discussion on NaNoWriMo on Friday and I have to be there to represent.

I pray to the Old Gods and the New that the Force will be with me, always..........

Follow-up 6/2/2016: Well, to be fair, I didn't bump into a lot of Libertarians at the MegaCon, and the overall traffic wasn't bad. Didn't see ANY media crews outside the hotel where the nominations were taking place. So it wasn't the disaster I feared it would be.

On the other hand, THAT IS a Libertarian Party still obsessing over a twisted utopian ideal of Randian Objectivism and a Gold Standard that would kill the global economy. It's also a party that allows guys to get to the main podium and give a speech in the form of a god-awful striptease that NOBODY ASKED FOR. I will NOT provide links to what I'm talking about, because even *I* have standards...

Republican Congress Working As Promised: Which Is, They're NOT DOING A DAMN THING

We're here again, railing against the real source of our national woe: the broken dysfunctional Congress led by Republican factions that refuse to do their damn jobs.

Which recess session are we in now? The one that lasts two weeks or the one that lasts two months? I've lost track, our Congressional officials have SO MANY WEEKS OFF ANYMORE.

Sigh, okay, let's go to someone else's current observation of how messed up our Legislative Branch is at the moment. To Norm Ornstein at the Atlantic, take it away:

...The truly cringe-worthy failures started when both the House and Senate refused to even acknowledge the president’s budget, an unprecedented step, and the House and Senate Budget Committees followed by refusing to hold the usual annual hearing when the president’s top economic advisor comes to the Hill to discuss the budget and the economy. It was a sign of disrespect that was simply shocking...

...What about the congressional budget? Remember, back when Democrats controlled the Senate, Republican congressional leaders used to laud passing a budget as the single most significant action government could take? This time, the April 15 deadline passed without a murmur, much less an actual budget plan, from either house...

...Now add the embarrassment of the unprecedented failure of fundamental fiduciary responsibility by the Senate to even acknowledge the right of a president to nominate an individual to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court with eleven months to go in his term... The awful lapse on the Supreme Court nomination was part of a larger outrage, the failure to confirm a much larger number of nominees to both judicial and executive branch posts, a record for this Congress far more dismal than its comparable predecessors...

There are very legitimate arguments about the appropriate role and scope of the federal government. But few except nihilists and the most extreme libertarians would argue that protecting public safety in the face of catastrophe or epidemic should be off the government’s books or sharply constrained in scope. And right now, there are three such examples: the horrible Flint water debacle, a man-made (mostly state government-made) disaster; the Zika crisis, a classic disease epidemic; and the Opioid crisis...

Ornstein also fails to mention another crisis, slightly tied into the Zika health crisis, and that's Puerto Rico. As a territory, it's in the legal gray area of being supported by the federal but also running its own affairs, but a series of financial crisis over the decades have led to this point where Puerto Rico is billions in debt and requiring massive financial aid.

Financial aid that this Congress would likely choke on because it would mean A) giving social aid and B) the likelihood they'd have to raise taxes to pay for it. It could also mean that our federal government would have to finally get off its collective butt and fast-track the process of bringing Puerto Rico in as a full-fledged state in order to merge the debts into the federal government's.

So as you can see, the Republicans are treating these problems as the priorities they are...

...by completely ignoring them and focusing on crap issues. Like denying people who look transgender from ever using public bathrooms again. Even when there's no damn evidence that there's an epidemic of transgender people attacking anybody in bathrooms, this is now suddenly a SCANDAL / HORROR beyond all reckoning. Alongside the usual fearmongering over illegal immigrants, gay sex, abortions, Muslim pool halls, and Hillary's Death List.

PRIORITIES.

This is what drives me up a goddamn wall. That elected officials from one party - Republicans - are so obsessively destructive and yet nearly everybody else watching this are just "oh well, it is what it is."

We're going to be stuck like this until the crises all explode, one at a time or altogether, and in ways so catastrophic that lives will be lost. I'm worried we're facing another Katrina moment, only instead of the mismanagement coming from an inept Bush administration it'll be coming from an inept Republican Congress.

How many times do we have to go through this dance of death before Americans figure out the real threat are these anti-government buffoons intentionally wrecking their own institutions all for their dead-ender zealotry?

Some Notes: May 2016 Edition

Just to state for the record:

1) I'm still going to be at the Local Author's Signing event at the Wesley Chapel FL Barnes & Noble store on Saturday May 21 from 2 PM to 4 PM. I don't care if most of my blog traffic comes from Japan and Russia, I wanna see ALL of you there to support local authors, dammit.

2) I am still working on taking parts of this blog and converting it into a published work, following in the footsteps of Molly Ivins and the newspaper columnists of olde. I'm doing this partly because I want a print record of the ten odd years I've been blogging, partly because the book is going to be about Obama's tenure and there needs to be an outsider's view of how it all went down, mostly because I'm sick of seeing all these anti-Obama books on the shelves at libraries and stores.

2a) That said, converting weblinks to footnotes is a painful and tedious process when you gotta do it by hand. I'm also still stuck on a decent-enough title, not that many people voting on the poll of suggested ones...

3) Going back through the pro-Obama stuff, I now regret not finding the time back in May 2011 writing up the impact and significance of the SEAL raid that killed Bin Laden. It's a key moment in Obama's first term that deserved discussion and I missed it (too busy stressing out over job-hunting at the time I suppose). I'm going to have to write a book-specific article about it.

4) I've decided on going Friday in street clothes to the Orlando MegaCon May 27, and on Saturday May 28 going dressed up as the Jedi.

Friday at Noon, author Bill Hatfield and others are going to discuss writing as part of NaNoWriMo, a forum which I hope to be an audience member. Check out the full schedule here.

On the Friday trip, I'm hoping others I know are going to show up and maybe we all can go see the X-Men movie at a nearby theater. Anybody? Anybody?

Primary Voting Still Too Low

I don't care what the papers are saying about Trump "getting the most primary votes ever" for the Republican nomination:

Politico's Kyle Cheney noticed something interesting about Donald Trump's big primary wins on Tuesday night. With a number of states still to vote — including the largest, California — Trump is poised to set a new record vote total in Republican presidential primaries. The current record is held by George W. Bush, with his 10.8 million votes in 2000. Trump, according to RealClearPolitics, is currently at a little north of 10 million.

If 10 million or 12 million or 15 million sounds like a lot to you, try some perspective:

• There are roughly 142 million voters overall in the United States as of the November 2014 election cycle (numbers are bound to go up a little for 2016).
• If turnout is anything equal to the 2012 election, we're expecting 129 million actual voters (out of 313 million residents).
• There are no official numbers of registered Republicans, but if we're looking at primary turnout, the total turnout of 25 million - not just for Trump but for all the other 16 wannabes who failed - is about 17 percent of the total registered voter count. And to be fair, the Democrats are seeing smaller turnout numbers at around 12 percent of the total voter count (the excuse being a simple two-player race of Hillary vs. Bernie).

Overall voter turnout for the primaries looks to be 29 percent of the registered count.

That's obscenely low.

Part of the problem is that the independent non-party voters cannot vote in Closed Primaries, which is most of them. A Closed Primary makes sense for a party to host because it encourages party membership... except that it doesn't. There is no way a majority of Party members - neither Republican NOR Democrat - are contributing their time and energy towards selecting their own party nominee.

It boils down to choices, and a lack of them. Let's be blunt, if the voters who DIDN'T SHOW UP for a Primary were counted as "No Confidence" None-Of-The-Above votes, none of the last remaining names would be standing. Nobody would be. Which is why we don't get "None of the Above" as a ballot choice.

There ought to be other ways - better ways like full holidays or mandating a minimum voter count before the elections can be closed and confirmed - to encourage higher participation. To me, higher participation means getting more voices involved, more choices offered up to appeal to the broader range of voters. As it stands right now, the only candidates who run are the ones who think they can appeal to the extremists as those extremists are the only ones guaranteed to show up to vote.

Which makes the rest of us suffer because we don't end up with good choices at all. Just desperate ones.

If we ever get a primary where over 50 percent of the voter population actually shows up, then I'll buy the argument that the will of the people is being heard and that the winning candidate is truly reflective of the national mood and momentum. Otherwise, they're all just weak offerings to the Old Gods and the New.

Let Us Rid Ourselves Of These Illusions

This is what I get for reading too many comic books back in the 1980s and 1990s:

From Infinity Gauntlet #5, copied from F-ck Yeah Thanos tumblr

I just like that final paragraph: Let me be rid of all illusions.

I'd like to think I can live with that as part of my moral code, that I will not let myself get deluded by misplaced ideology or twisted perspective of the real world around me.

Thing is, I keep seeing others refusing to give up their illusions, and it gets painful to watch them founder and wallow.

Take, for example, the media elites who keep pining for some Republican Savior to rise from these Beltway streets. Per Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice:

One should never dismiss any possible development in the multi-ring circus of American politics, especially in this particular cycle. And surely every American is entitled to his or her very own political Theory of Everything, whereby the sufficient application of correct thought to the perfect handcrafted artisan unicorn candidate will CHANGE THE CONVERSATION such that everyone lives happily ever after. But the latest media proposals by the usual batch of Media Village Idiots, reliably wrong ‘pundits’, and ambitious careerists gunning for earned media don’t even rise to the dignity of a couple of tinfoil-hatted cranks taking up floor time at local meetings and wall space on public buildings (or Facebook) to promote the Independent Union of Patriotic National Americans for Responsible Freedom…

Another take is from Alexandra Petri with the Washington Post - whose snark is attention-getting, this post about the DC Metro is one of the best satire works I've seen in regular print - who notices that the Republican Party leaders are twisting themselves up into knots trying to avoid saying they'll back Trump:

...But fortunately for senators in tough, competitive seats, there is another option. You don’t have to endorse Trump. You can just support the Nominee of the Party.

These are not the same thing at all! They are quite different. The Nominee is everything Trump isn’t.

Here’s Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) talking about Trump: “I have strong disagreements with Mr. Trump.”

Here’s McCain talking about the Nominee: “The nominee of the party, the party of Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt, has my support.”

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) won’t endorse Trump. In February, she said, “There’s no place in our society for racism and bigotry, and I found Mr. Trump’s response to David Duke and the KKK disgusting and offensive.” But she will support the nominee...

It is good that there is this third option. The Nominee sounds wonderful.

He seems to have a strong base of support. Senators who have nothing positive to say about Trump at all speak glowingly of the mysterious Nominee.

Very little is known about him, apart from the fact that he is probably statesmanlike and definitely not embarrassing to have at the top of the ticket, and probably Reagan would have liked to have a beer with him, or something, but what more do you need to know?

You can see it - just like Petri does - between the lines: these are people - politicians, pundits, pollsters - still pining that somehow they can turn this Con Artist Trump into a "respectable" mimic of their One True Reagan, or better still find a "pure" True Conservative (tm) to stop Trump with the purity of Burkean Thought and then crush Hillary driving all Democrats before him while the women lament.

As Anne Laurie notes:

But wherever could they find such a New Hope - a candidate of sterling conservative credentials, telegenic enough for the cruel media spotlight, someone who doesn’t mind risking the considerable chance of ending up as a nation-wide punchline? Cometh the hour, cometh the man...

That's the thing, isn't it? The Republicans and their pundit allies have been looking for this One True Conservative Savior (tm). Where the hell is he?

When this whole 2016 circus started back in 2012 - I am not kidding, the second Karl Rove had a meltdown over Ohio the entire party was planning for this - the buzz among the Republicans was that "we're going to have a strong selection of candidates" for this cycle. But by 2014 the signs were there that whatever bench of talent they had, the GOP really didn't have all that deep or imposing or charismatic a roster. And look what we got.

This year's roster - a group of weak unpopular governors, weak unpopular senators, and how-the-hell-did-they-show-up set of amateurs - was weaker than 2012's, made up of weak unpopular governors and senators and congresspersons and amateurs. And THAT election cycle was weaker than 2008's, made up of weak unpopular governors and senators and congressmen and barely one popular senator in McCain who still blew it on a ramshackle platform blown apart by a collapsing economy blamed in part on Bush the Lesser's poor oversight.

There's been a downward spiral in True Conservative (tm) Heroes to rally to.

What we're getting is this ongoing fantasy, this wish fulfillment, among the Far Right pols and pundits desirous for The Return Of The Reagan Heir: the Prince That Was Promised. We're talking about a set of people pining for the days when it was 1985: when Reagan stomped the hell out of Mondale and his dirty hippie librul army of Electoral College no-shows, Bipartisanship meant Democrats paid for the bar tabs, Capitalism was ascendant, Soviets were getting blown up in Afghanistan, Wall Street was peaking, Grenada was pacified, MTV gave us endless loops of "Money For Nothing", and it was safe for decent honest hard-working folk to openly declare they were proud to be Republicans Americans.

These pundits and pols still don't get it: that was all an illusion.

Even Reagan wasn't really Reagan. For all his "heroics" of tax cuts, union-busting and deregulation, Reagan really raised taxes again when the early cuts in 1981 made things worse, didn't go after the social safety nets like Medicare and Social Security like promised, and eventually played nice with the Soviets on getting nuclear weapon bans in place.

All Reagan really had was a skill set at being charming and congenial and communicative, which created his appeal to the general population. But that didn't make a True Conservative (tm) the way his hagiographers believe to this very day.

When the modern Republican Party is pining for a Savior, they're really pining for a candidate who can be this Passive-Positive person, someone likable and pleasing to the audience. Which was why a lot of pundits kept falling in love with these photogenic types like Marco Rubio or Scott Walker. But that person doesn't exist anymore. And for one very good reason.

The Republican Party doesn't HAVE anyone anymore who is genuinely likable or congenial. The Far Right has driven everyone out who can be open-minded and receptive and appealing on a personal level. They've created an environment within their party ranks that every member HAS to support a dogmatic agenda - restrict or kill a federal government they view as "bad" - that can only be backed by Active-Negative types of dour and sour politicians. That type of agenda can only attract that type of candidate, no matter how hard they try to fake empathy.

Any hope they have of a Republican even pretending to be the same as Reagan - or Eisenhower, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Lincoln - is a fool's hope.

This is it, Republicans. This is it, Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson and David Brooks and others raging against the oncoming storm that is Trump. No more lies, no more illusions. The reason you're getting Trump as your banner-carrier is because all your efforts the last 30 years to build a new Reagan has instead built a toxic stew of racism, sexism, anti-Establishment anarchy, and failure of leadership within your own ranks.

There is no one coming to save you, Conservatives. There is not enough fairy dust to make this wish come true. You as Republicans are utterly screwed, and you made it that way. No excuses.

The best we can hope for now is that there's enough American voters fighting to save themselves at the ballot box able to drive out this toxic Party of John C. Calhoun into the gutters where Eisenhower feared it would go. Get out the vote, America, go vote this November and for the Love of God don't vote Republican, they have neither deserved nor earned our vote for decades now...

Top Ten Reasons To NOT Vote For Trump

This may be an obvious concern, and this may be repeated on a thousand other political blogs over the next six months, and this may upset David Letterman's lawyers to where I'll get a cease-and-desist, but dammit attention must be paid.

TOP TEN REASONS TO NOT VOTE FOR TRUMP

10) Trump is the first official nominee of a major political party lacking public office experience of any kind.

This is really a key component we need in a President: experience or understanding of how the Public Sector - not just how a government works but also the Responsibility to the Civic Trust - operates.

We are talking about experience with elected, nominated, or civil service offices. It's not only nominees that won elected office to the House or Senate or a Governorship, but also those who only served in the Cabinet - Hoover - or in the military - Taylor, Grant, Eisenhower (Washington served in the Virginia colonial Assembly, that counts as a legislative role) - or in the judiciary - Taft, who was an appellate judge before called into the Executive branch as a Cabinet Secretary - or in the civil service - Arthur, as Port-master of New York. And these are the ones who actually served as President.

There are very few - losing - candidates for the White House I can find in the history books who lacked experience in the public sector this way. Wendell Willkie comes close, but he had years of political activism - with far greater understanding than Trump has shown - that made him a major player in political circles. Horace Greeley, whom I remembered primarily as a newspaper editor, had served a term of office as a House Representative, so he had elective experience. Nearly every other person who's run on a party platform for President has experience in the public sector. Trump's the only one who does not.

Just on this point alone, we should not be voting for Trump as President. If this were for a lesser office, it wouldn't be an issue. But the Presidency of the United States is the highest office in the land, one that demands exacting awareness of the mechanisms of public administration. Experience may not be a Constitutional requirement, but it's one the voters should require of their choices for the most powerful office in the land.

9) Trump fails to understand how government budgets work.

Although this is a shared failing among other Republicans, whose budget proposals since 2001 fall along the lines of "wishful thinking" that involves clapping your hands for the Tax Cut Fairy to grant us budget surpluses instead of the massive deficits they really incur. Trump's budget plan falls into the same trap of slashing taxes on the rich, slashing spending for the poor, and slashing regulations that are supposed to keep all of us healthy and breathing.

8) Trump fails to understand how government debt works.

Trump thinks he can get the creditors holding our nation's enormous public debt to take "discounts" as though this were all in yet another Bankruptcy Court where deals like this could get made. Never mind the shock to the global economy that would cause, for interest rates to go up for all the wrong reasons, and other calamities. The immediate comparison I've seen online has been Argentina. Just multiply that by the size of the U.S. economy and you might get a clue how BAD this idea is.

The whole concept of "full faith and credit" seems to elude him.

7) Trump fails to understand, period.

There's a phrase I remember describing George W. Bush as "incurious". It came up often during 2005 and 2006 when the failures of his administration were more obvious by the day. What got out, was commonly understood among observers, was that Bush the Lesser was unconcerned or unwilling to comprehend events that unfolded under his watch: That the importance of policy decisions he had to make as President slipped past him without thought.

Trump gets the same comparisons: that when it comes to policy, Trump doesn't really care. He'll care enough to make public statements, some half-assed one-liner that will get him in front of cameras, but that will be it. He will bluff his way through talk about "the issues" and all he will do is claim that he'll "be great at" fixing that issue. And the issues he has given specific thoughts - immigration, trade - the answers he's given are rooted in insane policy positions - Building a wall! Deporting millions of people! Boycott and Bully China! - that fail to comprehend the sheer size of the problem he's going to create.

This may fall under the "Presidential Inexperience" criticism, but this is something that seems to cover nearly every issue out there, every aspect of social and religious and cultural and technical concepts that requires at least a modicum of understanding. If you think it was hard to picture Bush the Elder marveling at a grocery store barcode scanner back in the 1990s - which was a relatively new tech at the time and something Bush hadn't dealt with in-person for years - that's nothing compared to the level of ignorance Trump is going to bring to the office.

Shorter answer: If it's something that doesn't personally benefit himself, Trump won't care.

6) Trump's bankruptcies.

How many ways are we supposed to buy this swill that Trump is a successful businessman when he's in Bankruptcy court more times than we've had hot dinners?

And this is so open a flaw that it's one of the first things people attack Trump with. It's not ranked as high because it's become almost blase, we're desensitized to the horror of this outright failure at business claiming his great successes...

5) Trump's open hostility to those not like himself.

When it comes to women, when it comes to Hispanics, when it comes to Blacks, when it comes to Asians, when it comes to people who aren't in the business community, you are not welcome to Trump's World.

4) Trump's lying is at a level we haven't seen since the heady days of Tricky Dick.

It is a partisan reaction to accuse those opposite your viewpoints of being liars, but in Trump's case there's documented evidence. Tons of it, going back decades.

PolitiFact is a website that tracks public officials' statements and grades them according to research and factual data. "Pants on Fire" is for the outlandish comments crashing against every factual point that can be argued. Trump already has two pages worth of "Pants on Fire" with about a year of campaigning (Obama by comparison has one page... out of eight-plus years of public statements). In terms of lies and half-truths and misstatements, Trump leads the pack.

3) Trump's foreign policy agenda is a toxic mix of isolationism and interventionism that can alienate our allies, embolden our adversaries, and weaken international relationships into utter chaos.

No exaggeration. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp notes:

But it's not just ethos — it's also what he proposes to do to many countries, particularly American allies. Trump's actual foreign policy vision represents a fundamental break with decades of American foreign policy. Given that a lot of American allies depend on those very decades-old policies for their own security, Trump's rise is more than just cartoonish.

For them, it's legitimately terrifying.

2) Trump killed an entire sports league.

This isn't even funny. He bought ownership of a team in the USFL league, a fledgling rival to the National Football League in the 1980s that showed potential as a spring-time football program, and promptly talked most of the other USFL owners into a suicidal schedule shift to the fall as well as filing a massive anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL. Word has it Trump was hoping the lawsuit would force the larger league to merge like they did with the AFL back in the 1960s, and allow him to become part of one of the most exclusive rich people's clubs in the nation.

The jury came back with a finding that while the NFL was a monopoly when it came to television deals and market control, they also found that the USFL's problems were more to their own mismanagement and suicidal move to that fall schedule. Trump's own game-plan wounded their court case, and the jury found at the lowest value they could issue: $1.00 which was tripled under anti-trust rules to $3.00. After a round of appeals, the value of the win was appraised up to $3.76. The check - kept in the property of Steve Ehrhart the last USFL officer standing - has never been cashed (ironically it is worth millions as a collectible: Ehrhart hopes someday for the Football Hall of Fame to display it).

It is telling that for all of the supposed billions of dollars in Trump's finances,  NONE of the major sports leagues - football, baseball, basketball, hockey - want anything to do with Trump. There have been New York/New Jersey teams up for sale over the decades, and Trump has been blocked from every one...

For all the points I list here, this is the most personal. I am a Tampa Bay Bandits fan who will never forget nor forgive.

1) Trump is a Narcissist.

In short: This is all about him.

Let's go to the experts at the Mayo Clinic, who refer to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V) to classify the signs of having a Narcissistic disorder (this was all edited into Mayo's website in 2014):

• Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
• Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
• Exaggerating your achievements and talents
• Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
• Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people
• Requiring constant admiration
• Having a sense of entitlement
• Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
• Taking advantage of others to get what you want
• Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
• Being envious of others and believing others envy you
• Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

I added links to each sign of that personality to give context and background. Dear God. Trump fits this description to a T (which stands for TRUMP).

Why is having a Narcissist in the White House a terribly bad idea, and deserving of the top reason to NEVER vote Trump?

After all, we've had ego-driven men become President before: it takes large ambition to fill a large role.

But we've never had anyone as self-absorbed to this scale over success and superiority get this close to the Oval Office. And we're talking about a list that includes self-absorbed bullying egomaniacs like Nixon - who obsessed over his failings and need to prove himself against adversity - and Lyndon B. Johnson - who obsessed over his failings and need to win at deals - and Andrew Jackson - who obsessed over every slight and insult and need to dominate his opponents.

It's a personality trait that is toxic for a job title that is supposed to represent the entire United States. The President is more than just one man (or woman): The President is supposed to stand for every American citizen of every age and every gender and every skin color. The President speaks FOR us as much as speaks to us. On the world stage, the President is our proxy.

Trump won't care about that. He's made it clear on numerous occasions that he only views the population as his consumer market, his fawning lackeys, his useful stooges. He's shown open disdain for his own voters, and open contempt for everyone else.

He's made it perfectly clear that if he ever gets into the Oval Office, Trump is only there to serve himself.

On any one of these issues, it'd be enough to do whatever it takes to keep Trump out of the White House and away from the office of the President of the United States.

For the Love of God. I am not being funny or flippant. Don't Vote Trump.

It's CINCO DE MAYO Again!

And this 2016 could prove the most bittersweet...

Artist Ted Rall, posted via Forbes.com

Could this be our last reason to celebrate the Battle of Puebla, Mexico's defiant stand against an invading French force?

Could this be the last time we make the f0cking Chimichangas?

Could this be the last time we celebrate Mexican-American and indeed Latino heritage in the United States of America?

Could this be the last time we can fantasize about Salma Hayek?

...

NEVER!

SAVE CINCO DE MAYO!

Stop Trump from ruining one of the great made-up holidays in the United States!

UPDATE: Pinku-Sensei has the margaritas over at his blog! PREPARE THE CHIMICHANGAS!

FOLLOW-UP TO THE UPDATE: There is an ungodly image of Trump trying to eat a taco salad in his office claiming he's all up for Cinco De Mayo and that his restaurant grill in the building serves them all the time. No. Just... No. That is not how you impress Hispanics. That's how you make them watch the movie Machete over and over again in a growing rage...

Anniversary: Ten Years Gone

It kept slipping my mind until just now:

I have officially been blogging like a madmen for ten straight years.

I started a blog - back when this was Blogspot - on May 4, 2006 for several reasons:

• As a librarian I need to learn the blogging methods to teach instructional classes to the public about it.
• I had a background in journalism and a hobby/interest in creative writing.
• I was curious.
• I had political issues to discuss.

Originally this blog was going to be a serious, academic focus on the need for Constitutional reforms: our system of checks and balances were inadequate to the demands of the 21st Century, and our government had become unresponsive to the real needs of the citizenry.

So I started Amendments We Need, and figured I could spend an entry a week or a month to write long-winded essays of reformer ideas.

It stayed that way - with long gaps of inactivity - until December 2007, when the upcoming 2008 Presidential election grabbed my interest, and I found myself blogging too often about the general craziness - the economic downturns, the rise of Obama, the horrors of Palin, the anxiety of the age - of that election cycle

I kept the title - and old website addy - until May 2013 when I changed it to this more exotic and suspenseful Notice a Trend title. Muy sexy, no?

Man, ten years of this stuff.

I've had some crazy posts: Sharing voter turnout information to Andrew Sullivan's Dish blog back in 2008 when it meant something... Blogging about the Iranian Green uprising that turned bloody (but hopefully a sign of future freedom to that nation)... sharing work with the Lost Battalion/Horde following Ta-Nehisi Coates... the constant wait for confirming my Obama Shoelace Theory (that a Republican will go as far as to accuse Obama of unpatriotic shoelace tying)... the four years of job-hunting during the dark days of the Great Recession... getting into fights with anonymous comment posters... Having Crooks & Liars pick up the occasional entry for their Blog Round-Up, and Vagabond Scholar and Infidel753 and Tengrain and Monkeyfister and Pinku-Sensei and Clarissa and... oh man I lost track of the others sharing my links, kick me I am so sorry I forgot...

Ten years of all this.

A lot of it angry, some of it depressing, but enough of it hopeful and grateful for the future ahead for all of us.

Ten years gone, but more years ahead. And this one's not over yet. There's a lot of work to do (DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD) and there never seems to be enough time, but we get by...

Did you ever really need somebody, and really need em bad
Did you ever really want somebody, the best something you ever had
Do you ever remember me, baby, did it feel so good
Cause it was just the first time, and you knew you would... - Led Zeppelin "Ten Years Gone"

And I'm 9 posts away from reaching 1000 articles.

I should break out Yes' "Tempus Fugit" next.

Look Upon Trump's Works, Ye Republicans, And Despair

Do it? Reince, I'm not a Republican Serial Killer like Zodiac Boy over there. Do you seriously think I'd explain my genius yuuuuge master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I had my people do it thirty-five minutes ago. It'll be great. - Donald Trump

So last night Trump body-slammed victory out of the Indiana Primary, essentially driving Ted Cruz to suspend his campaign (i.e., drop out but keep his name on active ballots) and pretty much guaranteeing Trump wins the convention on the first ballot.*

Kasich, being late as always, suspended his campaign this afternoon. Trump is officially the last Republican candidate standing.

That screaming sound you hear in the distance is either coming from RNC headquarters or coming from 7 billion people across the planet.

Either way, it's not pretty.

The whole day has been watching the accelerated meltdown of whatever parts of the Far Right Noise Machine hadn't sold its soul to the Con Artist Supreme. The websites have been filled with reports about party leaders and pundits denouncing this dark day and declaring the party "dead." There's been several posting pictures of themselves re-registering their voter ID to drop out of the party altogether. Or even setting them on fire (uh, guys, with the voter suppression laws YOU YOURSELVES are passing, you might not wanna do that...) There are pundits coming out now arguing that the Republican Party leadership - effectively unaware and tone-deaf to their actual voting base - deserved getting the rug pulled out from underneath them. Per Rod Dreher:

Overall, though, True Conservatism™ — aggressive foreign policy, aggressive pro-corporate policy, and Christian-ish social conservatism — has been shown by Trump to have been hollow. It is interesting to contemplate what this will mean for the DC infrastructure of Conservatism, Inc. What will the activist groups do now that they are shown to be much less effective than we previously thought? Trump’s victory is not a good thing, but if it means the end of this mentality... then Trump’s victory is not the worst thing...

Prince Rebus Reince Priebus is doing what he can to keep the party on the same page, trying to spin this Trump victory as a good thing for the GOP:

"...You know, I didn't, but I don't think that’s necessarily bad. You know what? I think something different and something new is probably good for our party," he replied. "And look, I don't think anyone predicted what happened. So look, we're here. We're going to get behind the presumptive nominee..."

"...As I've said before, the candidates join us. We don't join the candidates. And so our party platform is clear. The things we believe in are clear. We don't change what we believe in as a party. We have a nomination process, and someone is going to get chosen. I believe Donald Trump will ultimately get chosen, and he's going to join the party," Priebus said.

And history tells us more often than not the party members will come crawling back to support even the candidates they loathe all because their alternatives (vote Democrat? VOTE HILLARY? Ewwww...) are beyond their limits.

However, this time it's different. Previous Presidential campaigns never had a candidate so unliked before as the nominee. Trump can well be the one that truly breaks a national party apart into factions - Trump and #NeverTrump - where enough party members flee in shame/disgust/frustration to cause an impact in turnout.

Based on 2012, Mitt Romney had at least 93 percent Republican support at the ballots in November. In May of 2012, Mitt's favorability among Republicans - having already clinched by then - was at 87 percent. (His popularity among national voters made a then-high 50 percent). Right now May 2016, Trump's popularity among Republicans is only at 59 percent, nowhere near the high Romney had. And Trump's national average (dated April) is around 33 percent, nowhere near Mitt's even-50.

There's a lot of lost Republican support in there. About 28 percent difference in the GOP numbers, and 17 percent difference nationally. Can Trump win back support to match Mitt's numbers? I doubt it. There is a lot of public anger and angst right now among the Republican ranks, and that's translating into voters either running away to vote elsewhere or else not vote at all.

'Cause here's the thing: any attempt by Trump to "pivot" from the hard-core Primary campaign style where he pretty much nuked every bridge to moderate and minority voters imaginable will be ignored or mocked. Worse, he and the GOP cannot afford to suddenly drop the hard-and-heavy anti-immigrant and anti-Establishment rhetoric that fueled Trump's rise: they would lose that very base that got Trump his victory. That anti-Hispanic, anti-Muslim, anti-Chinese stance will be the foundation of that 28-point loss of support within the GOP ranks made up of those voting blocs.

That all said, right now things do not look good for Republicans. Both Hillary and Sanders poll well over Trump as an opponent, even this far out before the conventions, and there's little sign that Trump is going to turn any of the states that went for Obama in 2012 (there's more evidence that he's LOSING at least four Red states to Hillary).

This is now a general election campaign driven by one question: Will 70 million Americans put faith behind a goddamn con artist like Trump with no political experience to be the nation's next President?

The answer so far is HELL NO.

Then again, never underestimate the Democratic Party's ability to blow a sure thing. I'm with Rude Pundit: DON'T F-CK THIS UP, DEMS.

*Unless Cruz is still able to plan a delegate coup to force a second ballot, but even that looks unlikely at the moment.

Star Wars Day 2016

Someone, somewhere, noticed that May 4th when said a certain way sounds like

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

So parties were planned and t-shirts made

and drinks prepared and thus we have

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU

Star Wars Day, kiddies. Show your dance moves.

The Republicans Had a Choice

They chose... poorly.

Update: Thank you again for the link, Infidel753!

Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic wrote today about The Party Decides - a book about the electoral process and how the political parties wielded all this power in making certain their chosen candidates were accepted by their respective bases - in an attempt to explain what the hell happened with this election cycle's Republican Party. He was trying to describe how this supposedly powerful organization with political savvy allowed an amateur demagogue like Donald Trump to outflank them and subvert the old ways.

...The authors argue that political parties convince voters to ratify their choices in primary elections by sending cues or signals. Crucially, when they say that “political parties” sway voters with these signals, they don’t just mean prominent elected officials and insiders at the RNC and DNC. As they see it, “the party encompasses interest groups, issue-advocacy groups, ideological activists chatting over beers, pundits aligned with “the party,” even bloggers who belong to its coalition...

So essentially there are all the guardian factions at play here. For the Republicans, it would be the deep-pocket SuperPACs sending out mailers as much as Fox Not-News and Rush Limbaugh alongside Grover Norquist and maybe even Drudge and Breitbart's old ghost. So blaming just the RNC itself for the rise of Trump to nominee is too simple. We basically gotta blame everybody...

“The party,” defined as broadly as it is in the book, includes a lot of voices that either support Trump or regard him as acceptable. And many members of “the party” who abhor Trump sent mixed signals and cues to voters. The contents of those signals help to explain why so many primary voters see Trump as the best choice...

The mixed signals that Conor is talking about is how the RNC and all those guardian factions (mis)handled Trump from the beginning. The party itself early on considered Trump unserious, that he wouldn't really follow through on the actual process of the primary season. As a result, they overlooked the impact of Trump's essential message to the GOP voting base: not just the open hostility towards immigrants and Muslims, but the growing resentment of a Far Right base that kept getting told through all their media sources one thing (The economy is bad because "they" took our jobs, Obama is selling us out to China and Muslims, "they" are coming to tax you for Obamacare Death Panels and take your guns) but kept getting betrayed by the people they elected to office (2010, 2012 and 2014) who did none of the things they promised (Obama's still not impeached, right?).

When it was too late to stop him from joining the primaries, both the party Establishment and their media allies suddenly found it difficult to push him out. Trump threatened early and often that if he wasn't being treated fairly, he'd jump out and start an independent campaign. Everyone else knew what that meant: a repeat of the 1992 election when Ross Perot's third-party vanity run doomed Bush the Elder - who lost too many voters from the split - in what could have been a close race against Democrat Bill Clinton.

That meant nobody else dared challenge Trump to where he could flee with his (stunningly large) Far Right faction, but that left the fights all one-sided where Trump could pummel the Establishment ranks - Jeb Bush in particular was mocked early and often - and get away with it.

Worse, as Conor notes, some of the other candidates looked to profit from Trump's wrecking-ball tactics, thinking - poorly - that once Trump imploded or fled the election cycle, they would be there to pick up the pieces and win out. In particular, the Last Opponent Standing:

Ted Cruz is a perfect illustration. He is the last man standing, barely, between Trump and the delegates he needs to win on the first ballot at the GOP convention in Cleveland.

At this point, Cruz has savaged Trump’s character.  “We wouldn’t tolerate these values in our children,” one Cruz ad says. “Why would we want them in a president?” Another ad accuses Trump of “a pattern of sleaze going back decades.”

These attacks are, I think, accurate.

But it isn’t surprising that Cruz’s attacks rang hollow to many Republican primary voters who can’t help but remember the many months when Cruz lavished extravagant praise on Trump, stating outright that his candidacy was a boon, not a bane to the GOP. Cruz even proclaimed himself “grateful” that the celebrity billionaire was in the race because it ostensibly forced the media to talk about illegal immigration...

...But Cruz saw that Trump was popular with a faction of the Republican base, so he cozied up to the demagogue, became a mendacious apologist for his egregious misbehavior, and brazenly misled the public about Trump’s character. Cruz did this because he thought that he could co-opt Trump’s popularity and win over a lot of his populist supporters. Instead, he helped to legitimate Trump, ratified the narrative that Trump alone forces the media to pay attention to the issues most important to a faction of Republican voters, and sapped some of the strongest critiques of Trump—the ones that Cruz would later used in his own attack ads—of their potency...

There's the "mixed message" that Conor talked about. But it wasn't just Cruz. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, Trump hasn't always been the hated unwanted member of this particular clown car campaign. A sizable faction of Republicans were just fine with Trump when it suited their purpose of stirring up their base...

...The elements of “the party” that sent pro-Trump cues or “Trump is at least acceptable” signals to primary voters—Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Breitbart.com, The Drudge Report, The New York Post, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Jeff Sessions, Rick Scott, Jan Brewer, Joe Arpaio—are simply more powerful, relative to National Review, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and other “Trump is unacceptable” forces, than previously thought...

...They just wish it wasn't so blatantly racist, sexist, ignorant, ill-informed, lazy, and nonsensical to where it threatens the entire party with destruction.

Even Conor notes that Trump does not exist in a vacuum. For all his demagoguery, Trump is running on an existing Republican message of mistrust and anger. Conor lists each point:

• Career politicians cannot be trusted. This widespread conceit in “the party” has effectively made it impossible for candidates with governing records and public sector experience to be accepted by large swaths of GOP primary voters.
• When the base doesn’t get what it wants, it is because of betrayal by party elites, never because a majority of Americans disagree with what the base wants.
• Rhetorical stridency is a better heuristic for loyalty than core principles or governing record—and there is nothing disqualifying about extreme incivility (hence, for example, a buttoned up think tank giving a statesmanship award to Rush Limbaugh, a gleeful purveyor of bombastic insults).
• Complaints about racism and sexism are always cynical fabrications, intended be used as cudgels against conservatives.
• Political correctness in governance is one of the biggest problems facing America.
• Illegal immigration poses an existential threat to America.
• President Obama has deliberately made bad deals with foreign countries to weaken America.

If any movement conservatives in the #NeverTrump crowd doubt that “the party” has sent all of those signals or cues, I’ll gladly expound on any of them. Taken together, it’s easy to see why a majority of an electorate that bought into those premises would be more attracted to Trump than to anyone else in the GOP field...

If Trump is thriving in this wingnut environment, it's because the Republican Party in total - the elected officials, the media elites, the fringe rabble-rousers - created and nurtured that environment for decades.

This is where the Republicans had a choice, but it was one they made years ago. Actually, they had a series of choices they made, and each one has led to this moment.

• The Republicans had a choice whether or not to court the social conservatives of the Deep South back in the 1960s, when the Democratic leadership went all-in on Civil Rights that alienated the Dixiecrat faction. The GOP saw a solid, growing voter base of resentful Whites and forged their Southern Strategy. This is why the modern Republicans are no longer the Party of Lincoln but the Party of John C. Calhoun.
• In the 1970s and 1980s, the Republicans had a choice whether or not to court the Religious Right into a more active role in politics. The party saw the means to solidify their conservative ideology and control their messaging using God as a banner. The trade-off was that they allowed evangelicals and strident cultural warriors who refuse to compromise on their faith transmit such refusal of compromise to any political dealings at all.
• The Republicans had a choice after Bill Clinton's win in 1992 to regroup from a shaky loss and retain some high ground on governance and competency. Instead, they doubled down on both a Culture War called by Pat Buchanan to purge their own party of RINO moderates as well as an open media campaign against Clinton using the Politics of Personal Destruction to hound him and weaken his administration. It did weaken Clinton and exposed his more sordid habits, but it backfired by exposing a lot of the Republican leadership as hypocrites... and it gave too much power to the Far Right media - especially Limbaugh and Fox News - to dictate what elected officials had to do in office.
• The Republicans had a choice after George W. Bush's administration - at least from 2006 onward - to admit the failures of that administration across the board: mismanaged war efforts, a botched economy, deregulation disasters, etc. Instead they pretend to this very day that none of that really happened, or wasn't as bad as it looked, or that it was all someone else's - Bill Clinton first, Barack Obama later - fault. Which means the party leadership is perfectly willing to repeat the same mistakes, something that terrifies many voters.
• The Republicans had a choice after Barack Obama's inauguration over whether or not to work with this Democrat in the White House. The call for bipartisan efforts were rather high, the belief that the Republicans ought to provide some input in order to keep a stake in the political arena and keep Obama from pursuing a more strident Progressive agenda. Instead, the party leadership chose full-out obstruction to deny Obama "any victory" of legislative success. While it prevented that Progressive agenda, it also painted the Republicans into a corner where they can't actively pursue any legislative agenda of their own (we are currently seeing this session of Congress be the least-active of all time... out of the last two sessions of Congress that were just as barren). And it underscores an irony in that Obama was - as an Active-Positive based on Barber's Character traits - someone who could compromise with Republicans as long as it meant effective legislation. Instead, the Republicans insisted on harsh concessions that no Democratic President would accept.
• The Republicans had a choice in their philosophical outlook on politics: they could have retained the core Conservative value of restraint in policies, in opposition to the Liberal impulse of charging into massive reforms that could be reckless in the long-term. Instead, the party pushed their own reckless and uncompromising agendas to where the Liberals are now the sane and cautious ones.

Time and again, the Republican Party had to choose between immediate, short-term gratification over long-term survival. Each time, they chose to win in the moment and revel in such victories without accepting the consequences those victories entailed. Each time, the modern Republicans chose poorly.

And now the bill's come due.

Michael Taggart Please Pick Up The Courtesy Phone

Hello, Mr. Taggart. You left a comment on this blog this weekend asking for me to contact you, but you did not leave a forwarding link.

So I need to leave a link here for you to email me. I tried to add this to the article in case you re-visited it, but I'll create a brand new blog article here in case you're just tracking the blog itself.

The best way for you use that email link is to right-click on it, Copy the address link, go into your email account directly, use the Compose command, and then right-click and Paste in the To: field. Or if you're viewing this via a Tablet, just tap the link and it should pop up your Email app to Compose that way.

Thank you.

May 2016: Very Busy

There's a couple of things happening this month, so I will be slightly distracted but I will post here when I can.

Above all this is a birth month, so yay, there will be cake.

I am going to be at a Local Authors signing event in Wesley Chapel FL (north of Tampa) at the Barnes & Noble store in the Wiregrass mall on Saturday May 21st, alongside 25 other local authors. It would really be great if a lot of people showed up that afternoon between 2 to 4 PM to help promote local writers, and you may find among the various books and genres something worth reading! I'll be there promoting some of my printed works as well as my ebook stories.

There's always May The Fourth and Cinco De Mayo, but May 4th will have a special connotation this year as an anniversary, so please do attend.

Also, MegaCon is this Memorial Day Weekend, so yes I will go. I've been contemplating going as a Jedi again, but I plan on going different days so maybe that Saturday I will.